Kaima Taira wins Pacific League award while strengthening case to be Cubs' top free agent target

The Chicago Cubs lost in the Wild Card Round due to a sudden absence of offense, but anyone who watched the team throughout the regular season knows their biggest weakness, as always, remains on the mound. Heck, Jed Hoyer said as much in his end-of-season press conference, effectively admitting the work he's done in recent years on the pitching side of things hasn't been good enough.

A major difference this year is that Hoyer will be working with a mostly clean slate. All of Shota Imanaga, Kevin Gausman, Matthew Boyd, Clay Holmes, Hunter Harvey, Colin Rea, Aaron Civale, Caleb Thielbar, Jacob Webb, Trent Thornton, and David Peterson are due to become free agents or have a path to free agency via options this offseason. Some of them will surely return, but the front office is basically going to have to rebuild this pitching staff from scratch over the course of the winter.

With that context in mind, it's probably reasonable to say that literally any pitcher who becomes available this offseason (save for Tarik Skubal) will be fair game for the Cubs. And if that's the case, there's no doubting who the top target should be.

Kaima Taira is a picture-perfect fit to address Cubs' biggest pitching needs in free agency

Kaima Taira is one of the most-hyped international players in the world right now, following a career-best season with the Seibu Lions that earned him the NPB's ERA title. He finished the year -- just his second as a starter -- with a 1.36 ERA over and 2.28 FIP over 146 innings.

At 5'8" and 220 pounds, his build is more reminiscent of Moises Ballesteros than any modern-day starting pitcher in the North American big leagues. That he also spent six of his eight seasons in Japan as a reliever will also call into question his ability to handle a starter's workload in MLB.

However, he comes equipped with a fastball that can touch triple-digits and a ridiculous eight-pitch mix that has made him wildly effective in every role the Lions have used him in. Though his strikeout rates have fallen in his years as a starter, he's more than made up for it with an improvement in his command and consistent ability to generate groundballs. That kind of pitcher would play extremely well in front of the Cubs' elite infield defense, and he'd immediately resolve one of the team's biggest issues thanks to his incredible ability to keep the ball in the park (career 0.3 HR/9).

The expectation is that he'll be posted in early November, which would give him a little less than a month to decide on a future home before the lockout. The Cubs, who have scouted Taira's starts in Japan, would be wise to jump on that bandwagon quickly -- though they have experience waiting out a posting date, as they did with Seiya Suzuki back in 2021-22, the rest of the league likely won't allow Taira to sit around in free agency for long.

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